


You Imagine an Ocean

by kyokairan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fix-It, Force Bond (Star Wars), Redeemed Ben Solo, TRoS Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22091080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyokairan/pseuds/kyokairan
Summary: At night, desperate to sleep, she imagines an ocean.The water is calm, a perfect mirror surface that reflects the moon and a hundred galaxy’s worth of stars. Rey likes to think that the water is the Force and she is the island within it, sitting in the middle of the serene stillness, waiting for the moment that she doesn’t feel alone.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 7
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! This is the first fic I have written in a very long time, so please be kind! Like everyone else, I left TROS feeling disappointed, so this is part fix-it fic, part character exploration. I hope you enjoy!!  
> I'll be adding an epilogue in the next few days~

Nights on Tatooine are cold. Honestly, it’s no different to the nights on Jakku, but the renewed loneliness after a year of constant company seeps the warmth right from her bones. Finn’s soft snoring doesn’t fill the space of the hut like it did on the Falcon, nor does Poe’s quiet murmurs in his sleep. It’s just the sound of her own breathing, ragged and uneven when she remembers all that she had, and all that she subsequently lost.  
Even during the day when she’s scouring the sands, making trades and repairing droids in Mos Eisley, she never quite feels the full warmth of the sun. It’s as though a vital part of her has been disconnected, stolen away by the cruel hands of fate.

If only Ben were here …

No. Rey refuses to let her thoughts go there. Imagining what life on Tatooine would be like with Ben’s presence at her side is more torture than she can bare. That soft smile when she held his face in her hands promised so much. She could see it; a simple, peaceful life, one filled with a love she never thought she would know. And then … he was gone. Those promises all slipped through her fingers like the Jakku sands.

No, Ben is … Ben is gone.

Even now, months after the battle on Exogol and her reunion with the Resistance, Rey has a hard time admitting that fact. Ben is gone, and there is nothing she can do to change that.  
His absence is a gaping hole blown through her chest, one that refuses to heal and only grows wider in the chill of the night when she longs to feel his arms around her just once more.

* * *

At night, desperate to sleep, she imagines an ocean.

The water is calm, a perfect mirror surface that reflects the moon and a hundred galaxy’s worth of stars. Rey likes to think that the water is the Force and she is the island within it, sitting in the middle of the serene stillness, waiting for the moment that she doesn’t feel alone. Sometimes Luke speaks with her, sometimes it’s Leia that visits; but the one person she truly wants to see never comes.

Night after night, like etched tally marks on durasteel walls, she waits for Ben to reach out to her in those dreams and night after night, she remains alone. The Force wouldn’t have rejected him. If it had, she would have been burying a body instead of folding up battle-worn clothes that were now hidden away inside a trunk in her room. No, Ben would have become one with the Force the same way his uncle and mother had, so why does he refuse to see her? There is no reason for him to reject her here. Neither the Resistance nor remnants of the First Order could judge them here, so why does he continue to avoid her?

The question goes unanswered and the perfect mirror surface begins to ripple with the tension and unsurety. Rey doesn’t notice it until one night, she arrives on the island and a storm rages around her. Towering waves crash upon the island’s sands, eroding its edges until she’s overcome by them and swept out to sea. Thrashed about beneath the surface, the rage of the storm feels oddly familiar. What once was calm is now a fury that refuses to be quelled until it has run its course and expended all the energy it has withheld for so long.

So much like …

Rey jolts awake in her bed, gasping for breath and soaked to the bone not by sweat, but by the storm she’d been drowning within moments before waking. Her clothes hold the chill of the water and the tang of salt as she peels them away and hangs them to dry. 

This continues for a week.

Night after night, Rey is pummeled beneath the weight of those waves until she wakes up gasping for air. She tries to fight it every time; imagining new ways to protect herself from the onslaught. She imagines a larger island, imagines stone walls to barricade the waves, imagines a boat or a raft to keep herself afloat. Yet each and every solution is knocked down like its predecessor until finally, she gives in and releases her own rage into the storm.

Rey screams until her throat is raw and she falls to her knees in the sand, curled up and sobbing because she’s never felt emotions as strong as these. All the pain and loneliness and frustration and anger and utter despair that she’s been keeping bound inside her; she hurls it out into the wind and waves. She lets them carry everything away and when she wakes in the morning, it’s not drenched and gasping for breath; it’s with an odd sense of dissonance that she hasn’t felt since the escape from Crait. That moment when she closed the access bay to the Millennium Falcon and closed off her side of the Force bond with Ben. She felt the same way then; unharmonious with the Force.

Rey remembers the days that followed their escape, her back aching after hours spent pouring over the Jedi texts, hoping to learn all she could about the Force and its will within her and everything around her. The dissonance she felt then hadn’t truly gone away until she came to terms with the dichotomy of the Force and the world around her. It is a balance; light and dark, life and death … happiness and pain, love and loss.

She spends the day meditating, coming to terms with that same dichotomy within herself, the happiness and pain and love and loss and joy and despair so that night when she dreams of the ocean again, she finds herself at the eye of the storm.

“I understand now. I kept everything locked away because I didn’t want anyone to think I was weak for feeling these things, but I understand now. I can’t keep lying to myself, pretending I’m okay when I’m … I’m really not.” Tears stream down her cheeks as she speaks to the storm, admitting what she has tried so hard to ignore.  
“Ben is gone. He’s gone and he’s not coming back, not even here, and I -” Her words are cut off as a sob chokes her throat. It’s so hard to say it.  
“I’m alone.”  
Speaking those two words is both a relief and a weight that settles within her chest. She wipes her tears away on the backs of her hands and sniffles, watching as the storm calms until it’s nothing more than a gentle breeze through her hair. She’s ready to wake up again when she hears it, just the faintest whisper in her ear.

“ _ You’re not alone. _ ”

It feels like her heart seizes in her chest in that moment. Part of Rey tells herself that it’s just Luke or Leia, reminding her that they’re always going to be here to guide her, but there’s another part of her that wants to believe it’s the voice she’s been longing to hear for so long.

“ … Ben?”

There’s a long pause and then she hears it.

“ _ Rey. _ ”

Her name is spoken like a sigh of relief. From where, she can’t tell, but she knows what she heard and she knows it’s Ben. Fresh tears blur her gaze and she can’t hold them back now, not with her own overwhelming sense of relief and joy at just hearing his voice again.

“Ben! I - Where are you? Are you - are you real?” Please gods, don’t let this be a figment of her imagination. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if this is just her desperate mind playing tricks on her.

“ _ It’s okay, it’s okay Rey. I’m coming. I know where you are now. Just - I need you to wait for me a little longer, okay? _ ”

Rey wakes up that morning with tears still fresh on her cheeks and the sudden realization that she no longer feels that gaping hole inside her chest anymore. The weight that came from admitting her pain and her loneliness; it firmly settled itself within that empty space, patching its torn edges and continuing to fill it with something that terrifyingly feels like hope.

* * *

She spends the days that follow the same way she has spent all the others; traveling the desert plains of Tatooine and making trades in Mos Eisley, but it’s done with a renewed sense of purpose. The patrons she repairs droids for even go as far as to ask what has changed that has her in such an upbeat mood. Rey is mildly ashamed to learn that they’ve always seen her as the sad and lonely girl she tried so hard not to be, but she’s eager to assure them that she is feeling better now.

Slowly but surely, that wound inside her begins to heal and the bond once thought to be broken forever begins to form again.

Rey refuses to make a single tally mark on the physical walls of the camp she calls home, but her mind is quick to add up the days. It’s been two months, one week, and three days since she heard Ben’s voice within her dreams telling her to wait just a little longer. She has dreamt of the ocean and that same island countless times since then; the waters are calm and the skies clear and filled with stars, but she hasn’t heard his voice again. It’s in this space that she can see the bond; a red thread connecting her to a point far off in the horizon. It shimmers in the starlight, bright and gleaming with renewed life. Even outside her dreams the bond is there, not quite solid but undeniably present, so she doesn’t let herself fret over Ben’s lack of presence too much. She does, however, let herself get swept away in her thoughts more often than she would care to admit.

It’s been one of those days, where she finds herself staring out into the horizon, looking but not quite seeing something out in the distance, so it doesn’t come to any surprise to her that she doesn’t sense the thief rummaging through her home until she’s already slid down the hill.  
The shadow pauses in one room, her room, and she takes advantage of that brief moment to rush inside, saber blazing with righteous fury.

“You! Thief! What do you think you’re doing here?!” she shouts, leveling the saber at the unknown and very unwelcome intruder. “Oi! I’m talking to -”  
The words die on her tongue when she sees what the thief is holding. It’s Ben’s sweater. The one he was wearing during the battle on Exogol. When he …

“Why would you keep this? It looks like a rag.” The thief’s voice is muffled through the scarf covering their face, their expression unclear thanks to the goggles, but their disdain clear enough in the way they hold the sweater up to the light then toss it aside.

Rey is at an absolute loss for words.  
“Just who do you think you are?! You are in no place to be mocking my things you outrageous piece of -” Rey cuts herself off, growing flustered as the thief has the audacity to start  _ laughing  _ at her. “I hardly think this is a time for laughing!”

The thief pulls the goggles away and pulls the scarf down, revealing tired but warm eyes filled with mirth and a pair of perfect lips split by the widest grin Rey has ever seen in her life.  
“I’m sorry, piece of what? I am dying to know what you were going to say.” Ben laughs and runs a hand through his hair, releasing bits of sand from its luscious raven locks.

For a moment, Rey is too stunned to do anything but stare at him.

He’s here. Ben is here and he’s real and once those two things have processed, she’s tossing aside her saber and throwing herself into Ben’s arms. He catches her and holds her tightly, as if she’s a jumble of broken pieces and he is the glue that’s going to put her back together again. She breathes him in, finding that smell that is quintessentially Ben underneath the sweat and sand.

“You’re here. You’re really here.”

Ben presses his lips to the side of Rey’s head, refusing to let her go. He’s spent so long searching, navigating his way through an unending space where the sky and the ground all merge together, guided by nothing but a loose thread that lead him to the edge of a raging storm. It was there that he heard Rey’s voice in the wind and that he knew he finally found his way back home.

“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” Ben presses a kiss to the side of her head, followed by another to her forehead and more to her eyes and her cheeks. “I hope those are tears of joy.”

“Of course they are!” Rey wipes the rest of her tears away and looks up at Ben, so happy to see the peace on his face. Unbothered by the voices of the Dark Side, free from the weight of expectation and legacy. She brings her hands to his face and traces over his cheekbones with her thumbs, just like she had when he brought her back from the cold silence on Exogol, and draws him into a kiss. Rey can feel Ben smiling against her lips before he finally decides to kiss her back.

Ben rests his forehead against hers when they finally break apart, the smile still lingering on his lips.  
“You’ll never be alone again, Rey. Never.”

Rey’s heart swells with those words and a smile as bright as both of Tatooine’s suns fills her face.  
“Neither will you.”


	2. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So you’re telling me you came to Tatooine, buried both Skywalker sabers in the sand, and just … adopted the Skywalker name.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a fun little epilogue! Thank you so much for reading!!

“So you’re telling me you came to Tatooine, buried both Skywalker sabers in the sand, and just … adopted the Skywalker name.”  
The question comes late at night, accompanied by Ben’s thumb brushing over the scar that remained on Rey’s arm even after he brought her back from death.

“You make it sound ridiculous when you say it like that,” Rey mutters from where she’s tucked against his chest, tracing over each mole and beauty mark she can find there.

“Oh, it’s definitely ridiculous. The epitome of ridiculous.”

“I was laying Luke and Leia’s sabers to rest! It’s what they would have wanted, and the name … it felt fitting! What’s so wrong with that?!”

Ben lies there for a long moment then bursts out laughing, to the point that Rey has to sit up because he’s shaking too much. She makes a face at Ben as his laughter continues, so much so that he practically doubles over in the bed. Crossing her arms over her chest, she fixes Ben with a glare.  


“What’s so terrible about me being a Skywalker?!”

Ben calms himself down enough to stop laughing, though the amusement is still clear in his eyes and the uneven quirk of his lips.  
“All Skywalkers hate sand. It’s a non-negotiable rule of being a Skywalker. You’re required to hate sand and you, cyar’ika have a huge thing for sand.”

Rey rolls her eyes at him, not believing something so ridiculous, but deciding to play along because Ben is clearly having fun with this.  
“So if I can’t be a Skywalker, what am I supposed to be then?”

Ben sits up at this point and looks over Rey’s face, brushing his thumb over her cheek.  
“You don’t have to be anything other than you,” he says, seeing the indignance form on her face before he even finishes speaking. Leaning forward, he presses a kiss to her other cheek, “but,” followed by another kiss to the corner of her jaw, “you could take my name.”

Ben leans back far enough to watch Rey’s eyes go wide with the implication. She already knows he has no intention of leaving her, but this adds a new level to that commitment. It binds them together in another way besides their bond.

Rey doesn’t want to give him the victory of her jow just yet, not after making her feel ridiculous for burying the legacy sabers in the sand, so she replies with a glib “Rey Solo doesn’t have much of a ring to it.”

Unfortunately, Ben Solo has every bit the wit and cunning his parents both had and his reply is quick to follow.  
“Mmm you’re right,” the words come as a rumble from his chest, followed by a kiss to her ear, “but I am talking about my full name.”  
Ben leans back and meets her gaze, thumb tracing along the curve of her jaw before tipping her chin up.

“Rey Solo-Organa, Princess of Alderaan.” His lips find hers after speaking and Rey sighs into the kiss, loving the sound of that even more than she loved the sound of Rey Solo. It honors both of his parents, people who she greatly admire and continue to look up to.

“I love it - hold on.” Rey shoves Ben back, much to his confusion. “Princess of Alderaan? That’s Leia’s title.”

Ben looks at her, even more confused than when she pushed him away.  
“Well, yeah, but by New Republic law I would also be a Prince of Alderaan, so by taking my name, you would be Princess of Alderaan too.”

“You never told me you’re a Prince!” Rey punches him in the arm, knocking Ben onto his back and sending him into another fit of laughter. “Ben Solo, you’re an outrageous piece of bantha shit!”


End file.
